https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/issue/feed STS Encounters 2023-09-04T13:13:40+02:00 Peter Danholt pdanholt@cc.au.dk Open Journal Systems <p>STS Encounters is published by the Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies. The aim of the journal is to <span lang="EN-US">publish high quality STS research, support</span> collaboration in <span lang="EN-US">the </span>Danish STS <span lang="EN-US">community</span> <span lang="EN-US">and</span> <span lang="EN-US">contribute to the recognition of</span> Danish STS nationally and internationally. In this context STS is understood as a broad and interdisciplinary field. Encounters encourages submissions from all relevant fields and subfields of social and cultural inquiry dealing with scientific and technological matters. The editorial board emphasizes that the journal is to offer a broad and nuanced view of the Danish STS environment. This applies to theoretical and analytical frameworks, choice of method and substantive empirical areas.</p> https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139820 ‘The Sustainable State’ of STS 2023-08-01T13:34:14+02:00 Anders Blok abl@soc.ku.dk <p><em>What is the role of science &amp; technology studies (STS) in the collective search for a new ‘constitutional vision’ of the sustainable state, one that respects planetary ecological boundaries and enacts a ‘great green transformation’ of state, society, and its infrastructures? In this text – originating as a keynote presentation to the 2022 DASTS conference – I discuss, first, the kind of socio-technical imagination needed for STS research to navigate this contested knowledge-political terrain. Second, based on my co-authored book The Sustainable State (“Den bæredygtige stat”), I suggest four dimensions and collective research agendas that builds on and extends STS’s contribution: new ecological citizenships, new civil society transition alliances, new institutions of ecological democracy, and new socio-ecological markets. In extending established and fostering new analytical proclivities in alliance with other select knowledge practices, STS research will be key, I claim, to this collective building-site, arguably the overarching challenge facing our more-than-human societies.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Anders Blok https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139809 Mobilising Uncertainties in Air Pollution Science in Copenhagen 2023-08-01T11:34:14+02:00 Steffen Dalsgaard sdal@itu.dk Rasmus Tyge Haarløv rhaarloev@gmail.com <p><em>In this short article we discuss three different ways of measuring air pollution in Copenhagen, Denmark, in relation to the potential for using technoscientific tools and expertise to influence public policymaking meant to curb pollution. Based upon a mix of data ranging from scientific literature and public reports to interviews with scientific and lay stakeholders, we outline how the introduction of Google’s Project Air View, in combination with an increase in citizen engagement in air pollution, has come to play a key role in the re-invigoration of local concerns over air pollution. Previously, expertise on the city’s air pollution has been the domain of established scientists operating fixed monitoring stations, but this recently stable relation between science and policy is currently being replaced by an assemblage of contrasting views on air pollutants. Our analysis suggests that the measurements of emerging pollutants by Google’s project and by citizens themselves have impelled policymakers in Copenhagen to accept, to engage with and act upon new scientific uncertainties. We see this as giving rise to a degree of humility where emerging modes of knowing air pollution are treated as complementary with established ones.</em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Steffen Dalsgaard, Rasmus Tyge Haarløv https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139817 Is Denmark a green entrepreneurial state? 2023-08-01T13:07:06+02:00 Adam Veng adven@hum.ku.dk Irina Papazu irpa@itu.dk Mads Ejsing mae@ifs.ku.dk <div> <p><span lang="EN-US"><em>This article is based on digital methods research using the tools Hyphe, Gephi and CorText to map the relations between public Danish actors – from informal civil society groups and NGO’s to business and state actors - and their “matters of concern” (cf. Latour 2004) in the heated political situation around the development of green transition policies following the enactment of the Climate Act in 2019. The Act was, according to the newly elected social democratic government, the “most ambitious Climate Act in the world”. It included such political innovations as the Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change, a group of 99 randomly selected citizens mandated to give recommendations to parliament, and a series of Climate Partnerships, business and industry collaborations tasked with developing recommendations and frameworks for the business community’s engagement in the green transition. The Climate Act was passed after massive popular pressure from the civic climate movement leading up to the election. Despite these efforts and the apparent political will to engage with multiple voices and interests, our network mapping shows that the business community, with an emphasis on “innovative and technological solutions”, were soon to become dominant in the network and align themselves more closely with the political system than the civil society actors were able to with their repeated calls for more radical and political action on climate change.</em> </span></p> </div> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Adam Veng , Irina Papazu, Mads Ejsing https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139813 Taking a bird’s-eye view: infrastructuring bird-turbine relations during wind power controversies 2023-08-01T12:36:26+02:00 Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen dnfr@dtu.dk Sophie Nyborg sonyb@dtu.dk Julia Kirch Kirkegaard jukk@dtu.dk <p><em>In this paper, we explore bird-turbine relations, which are becoming a point of contention in controversies over local wind-farm projects. We conceptualize potential wind farms, together with the planning process preceding them, as a single ‘infrastructural arrangement’ that organizes how environments are known and affected by wind farms. Within the context of this infrastructural arrangement, we trace how two groups – opponents and developers of wind farms – discover birds as potential allies in defining specific bird-turbine relations that will help in either stopping or promoting wind farm projects. We observe two types of bird-turbine relations. In the first, which is present in current environmental regulations and is mobilized by wind farm opponents, birds are considered fragile and endangered by turbines. The second, proposed by a developer, problematizes current regulation through an alternative relationship of co-existence between birds and turbines, according to which birds are more robust and turbines less dangerous. This account of birdwatching leads us to discuss the many forms of politics that occur within or against the infrastructural arrangements of wind farm planning. We find that these politics have important consequences for whether or not wind farm projects are realized and for the way wind farms affect their surrounding environments.</em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Daniel Nordstrand Frantzen, Sophie Nyborg, Julia Kirch Kirkegaard https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139816 The Benefit of the Doubt: Rethinking critique in/of scientific knowledge 2023-08-01T12:56:52+02:00 Marie Larsen Ryberg mlr@ind.ku.dk <p><em>The relation between critique and scientific knowledge has become a perilous conundrum. The precarity of this relation is conspicuous in recent ‘post-truth’ dynamics but also in the field of Science and Technology Studies, where established critical approaches to scientific knowledge have been subjected to devastating (self-)criticism. This article explores an aspect of critique often left unnoticed, namely that of doubt, asking whether it might provide a pathway for rethinking scientific reasoning and critical thinking. Drawing on ethnographic studies of a university-wide initiative to promote the integration of research and teaching, the article considers how students and researchers tackle doubt in teaching that involves scientific inquiry and research. Contemplating what has been termed the positivity of doubt in American pragmatism, and its recent developments in French pragmatism, the paper considers the implications of the role of doubt in scientific inquiry for how we might approach the cultivation of critique in and of scientific knowledge today.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Marie Larsen Ryberg https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139807 War, PowerPoint, and hypnotised chickens 2023-08-01T11:16:24+02:00 Søren Sjøgren sosj@fak.dk <p><em>This article discusses concepts to explore decision-making processes in a military headquarters. Military planning is commonly perceived as a systematic and structured approach to organising ways and means to achieve military ends. While standardised procedures and decision-making tools are crucial for large military organisations to function efficiently, these devices are not neutral. Routines within the staff organisation carry implicit beliefs shaping the perception of war as a managerial problem with an optimal solution that can be elicited through a process and presented in a bulleted list. By examining organisational outcomes as socio-material assemblages, this article sheds light on how daily routines influence potential solutions and shape what can and cannot be thought. Conventional approaches in organisational studies have either overlooked the role of organisational tools or studied them as a matter of technology adoption. The entanglement of the social and material in organisational life should be observed and described empirically to understand how order is reconstructed after it has broken down.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Søren Sjøgren https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139814 Curating Complexities in Art, Science, and Medicine: Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) in Public Practice 2023-08-01T12:46:04+02:00 Hannah Star Rogers hannah.rogers@sund.du.dk Kristin D. Hussey kristin.hussey@sund.ku.dk Louise Whiteley lowh@sund.ku.dk Adam Bencard adam@sund.ku.dk Christopher Gad chga@itu.dk Eduardo Abrantes eduab@ruc.dk <p><em>What does art have to lend to Science and Technology Studies (STS)? Might we see art and its display in museums and galleries as a method of performing STS ‘by material means’? And what roles might STS scholars play in art-science collaborations? Drawing on our experiences with collaborations at the intersections of contemporary art and biology, we explore the similarities and overlapping practices of these knowledge communities and make a series of observations about the potential of the area of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) to refigure and complicate the art-science landscape. Our analysis emphasizes the museum as a material public forum and curation as a form of knowing, histories of art and science, and examples of scholarly facilitation and intervention in art-science. We examine emerging patterns in ASTS scholarship and emerging roles for STS scholars as facilitators, participant-observers, curators, and collaborators, particularly in art-science institutions and newly emerging STS and art contexts in Denmark, and specifically, the Medical Museion. Our analysis reveals the persistent third leg of curation, cultural history, or STS as party to collaborations between artists and scientists.</em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Hannah Star Rogers, Kristin D. Hussey, Louise Whiteley, Adam Bencard, Christopher Gad, Eduardo Abrantes https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139808 Toward an ‘Ever Closer Union’ 2023-08-01T11:23:35+02:00 Nina Frahm ninafrahm@cc.au.dk Kasper Schiølin imvksc@cc.au.dk <p><em>More than any other region attempting to get ahead in the global AI race, the EU has emphasized a commitment to ‘AI-ethics’ and invested significant work in the development of principles and rules for the ethical governance of AI. This paper examines the production, performance, and politics of AI-ethics in the EU through a close, co-productionist reading of how the “European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies” has framed AI and its desirable relationship to humans. Our analysis shows that the making of AI-ethics in this context extends far beyond the settlement of principles and norms for AI. Instead, we argue that AI-ethics is, at the same time, performing authoritative acts of ontological classification that cut the human clean from AI to render it controllable and manageable. These ontological politics, we show, serve to embed AI within long-held imaginaries of European unification beyond market harmonization and re-configure how the EU imagines to achieve an ‘ever closer union’ among its members in the innovation era. Different to attempts at deeper integration through the mobilization of science, the turn to AI-ethics presents a novel rationale through which the EU legitimizes its authority to govern, suggesting a constitutive role for ethics in the EU’s contemporary integration efforts.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Nina Frahm, Kasper Schiølin https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139819 Making the 3000m2 Prototype 2023-08-01T13:26:27+02:00 Ruth Neubauer ruth.neubauer@ndu.ac.at Ksenija Kuzmina k.kuzmina@lboro.ac.uk Elke Bachlmair elke.bachlmair@kunstuni-linz.at <p><em>The paper reveals insights from the project 3000m2 Prototype, a project where the design researcher investigates the making of her own house as a site of negotiation between professional building practices, use practices and material resources. The research draws on science and technology studies (STS) as the point of analytical departure alongside a material–reflective approach of practice–based design. The design of everyday living technologies, like the warm water and bathroom installations, is negotiated between the users, the professional builders, and the environmental forces, which inscribe the future use of these technologies. These emerging scripts are presented and discussed, revealing tension and misalignment between programmes of action in which builders are enrolled and those where the future user wants to design her house use in a resource-conscious way. This paper proposes the alignment of professional, use and resource considerations as a form of co–design of everyday living technologies. It argues that a more collaborative designing incorporating professional, use and resource considerations can produce technologies that lead to more sustainable living.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Ruth Neubauer, Ksenija Kuzmina, Elke Bachlmair https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139811 Everything is a prototype, but not at all in the same way 2023-08-01T11:48:27+02:00 Liam Healy liam.healy@sheffield.ac.uk <p><em>In this article I reflect on discussions from the 2022 DASTS conference around the shifting nature of prototyping in design research. Specifically, I reflect on Ruth Neubauer and colleagues’ work on ‘prototyping living spaces’ (2022, and this volume), and Simy Gahoonia and Christopher Gad’s (Forthcoming; 2022) study of the Danish Technical Comprehension experiment. I also reflect on an element of my own design-research that has involved developing speculative prototypes, namely a tandem bicycle that was designed as an ‘interview machine’ for gathering research on the Calais Jungle refugee camp in France (Healy, 2021). I go on to develop what I refer to as a prototyping ecology to underpin the above and to consider the different modes and methods involved in different kinds of prototyping practices, and the ways they stabilise and destabilise the situations they enter into. Finally, I ‘test’ this ecology by revisiting the aforementioned examples to explore the forms of ‘stirring’ that prototypes participate in, how they straddle the ecology, and the ways they produce and encourage research events where I argue for the importance of how one might become attuned to the ways they encourage the unexpected by forming new relations and events through material intervention.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Liam Healy https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139821 The Mixed Blessings of an Iterative Design Strategy 2023-08-01T13:39:55+02:00 Torben Elgaard Jensen tej@ikl.aau.dk Ann-Sofie Thorsen ansohjth@ikl.aau.dk <p><em>In design research, it is widely accepted that an ‘incremental build’ or iterative style of development will allow users to offer feedback at key points in the design process, therefore, creating a more user-oriented type of design. This paper presents a case that complicates and challenges this view. Based on a 12-month ethnographic field study of a design team, we argue that certain aspects of the iterative organization of design work may in fact impede the objective of incorporating user-feedback into the design process. The article explains this surprising finding by tracing how a variety of material and rhetorical representations of users were handled and incorporated by a design team. It explores how different prevailing agendas facilitated the adoption and rejection of user representations, and it reflects on the role played by the design team’s efforts to speed up the development process by using so-called out-of-the-box features – pieces of ready-made third-party software.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Torben Elgaard Jensen, Ann-Sofie Thorsen https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/139818 Thinking Participatory Design work-shops in the presence of cosmopolitics 2023-08-01T13:18:38+02:00 Peter Danholt pdanholt@cc.au.dk <p><em>This paper is a written version of a presentation held at DASTS 2022 as part of a panel session organized by Mike Michael, Alex Wilkie, Michael Guggenheim and the author. The idea behind the panel, inspired by laboratory studies in STS, was to propose a focus on workshops as ‘worldbuilding’ events, which implies a close scrutiny of how workshops are constructed and carried out and to what effect. Along the lines of Annemarie Mol’s ontological politics and Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics, workshops are not just spaces in which we explore and experiment with ideas and concepts that may or may not be realized at some point: they shape reality from the get-go. In the paper, I thus discuss Participatory Design (PD) workshops by way of Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitical and constructivist thinking. My discussion is based on a few but key publications from the field of PD such as the Handbook of Participatory Design (Simonsen &amp; Robertson, 2012).</em></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Peter Danholt https://tidsskrift.dk/encounters/article/view/140170 Introduction DASTS 2022 special issue 2023-08-21T11:54:51+02:00 Peter Danholt pdanholt@cc.au.dk Julia Kirch Kirkegaard jukk@dtu.dk Kasper Ostrowski imvko@cc.au.dk Irina Papazu irpa@itu.dk <p>This <em>STS Encounters</em> special issue is a collection of articles that has been developed from conference papers presented at the bi-yearly Danish Association for Science and Technology studies (DASTS) conference in 2022. The conference was held at the Department of Digital Design and Information studies, Aarhus University and hosted by the STS center at Aarhus University on June 2-3. 2022. The theme of the conference was: '<em>Living with Ruptures: Repair, Maintenance, and (Re)Construction</em>'.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span></p> 2023-09-04T00:00:00+02:00 Copyright (c) 2023 Peter Danholt, Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Kasper Ostrowski, Irina Papazu